The matter of human replacement by Artificial Intelligence : Still a rhetorical question.

10 min readAug 1, 2020

Technology’s extravagance is rising day by day. No one can deny the fact that today’s vast volume of data and state-of-the-art technologies are changing the existing environment by enabling individuals and organizations to simplify and improve existing processes in an unprecedented way. But the innovations come with its own repercussions. One of the singular fears of the advancements as raised by some commentators is the technological unemployment. This has been seen in many of the sectors like investment banks, law and accounting firms, hospitals and corporations where day to day manual and routine jobs are being replaced by automations. Technological advancements are inevitable. This is not something new that we are experiencing.

Realization of the benefits in the arc of technological advances often has given the path for accelerating the automation and adopting digital inventions throughout the economy. Fruitful examples are the Industrial revolutions we have experienced decade after decade. But the principle point of dialogue could be, to what volume the power of Artificial Intelligence may be maneuvered. In near future will the Automation result in a continuous redistribution of labor or it will result in a sudden and rapid job cessation? Let us discuss the advantages of the usage of Artificial intelligence in our labor market in conjunction with the effects and consequences with the good-sized adoption of automation.

As humans, we remain in constant fear that any new technological advances may dominate our talent one day. No doubt innovations have been rigorously transforming our life in a better way by rendering advanced living standards but then parallelly it is sneaking into the vicinity of human’s capabilities for doing certain jobs. Why AI has been a buzz? If we need to understand AI, this is an area of computer science where we empower machines to acquire human intelligence by acting and reacting like humans. And with each passing day when we are significantly closing the gap between machines and humans, their implementations are affecting our social ecosystems. It directly impacts the working conditions and employment. And this is the most immediate concern for everyone that AI-enabled systems might replace the laborers across various range of industries.

The Shifts and An Example

Artificial Intelligence is growing considerably with each passing second and we will see many more shifts in technology in years ahead and affect different industries. For example, there are self-driving cars being tested and being rolled out in the market, there are automated vending machines, there are drones delivering shipments, there are automated machineries for assembling products and the list goes on. Every segment of our economy is being taken by the automation and is benefited from this. An area which has been slowly adopting the convenience of Artificial Intelligence is the Healthcare Industry. It is witnessing human intelligence being replaced by artificial intelligence. Human Intelligence is an outcome of continuous learning over the years with the cognitive ability to respond to circumstances, adapt to new environments and holds the power to handle complicated task. As we recreate the human Intelligence with the help of AI, this becomes the tool to tailor the exact way human handles the environment.

Starting with a simple problem which AI is certainly solving is the management of health records. With the help of AI, variety of data which comes in many forms and many sizes are easily being interpreted proactively and strategically saved with sensible patterns which would have been a tedious manual work. Medical professionals are uncovering the hidden dynamics, movements and associations with the aid of AI and machine learning. To focus on some of the significant achievements in medical industry, we cannot skip mentioning when in 2017 A robot passed a medical Licensing Exam in china.[1]. This machine can automatically capture and analyzes the patient’s information and help with the initial diagnosis which can used in future treatment. In another scenario where a robot performed an hour-long dental implant operation successfully under supervision of human dentists [2]. Again, a significant advancement has been done where AI is helping to detect Melanoma a kind of Cancer which is notably difficult to detect with human eye.

Consequences and Numbers

We can draw a sense of better transformation of the scenarios by using AI, looking at the above examples. No doubt we are being highly benefited from the usage of automation and Artificial Intelligence. Be it in any domain. But in conjunction with the benefits these automations and machines adapting human behavior are causing a definite gap between humans and employment. When a machine involves in data management people loose their jobs there, When a machine starts medical operation a human doctor loses his/her job there, When a machine diagnoses any fatal problems , along with giving benefits to the consumer, it’s affecting the jobs of many who would have been engaged in the process of diagnosis. Every setting of your economy is experiencing the same trend. We are getting benefited with a cost of change in employment set up.

If we talk about numbers according to world bank analysis [3], in Unites States 47 percentage of occupation at risk. Similarly, in Japan the number says 55 percentage and in Lithuania it’s 56 percentage. In developing countries like India and China its 69 percentage and 77 percentage respectively [4].

Social Inference

Implications of the automation to the society can be polarized in many directions. It can be Psychological, Behavioral, Financial, Political and what not. The ecosystem of the society can be vastly dependent on the digitization. What can be a psychology of a patient when he/she can not feel the touch of a human doctor. Would a patient be that comfortable being treated by a machine though the margin of error is minimal? Will there be faithful connection between the patient and the robot? It would be difficult to fathom what would be our behavior in future. Again, contemplating that fact, many have argued introducing AI into our lives can affect the thought process of humans and may mould our behavior ethically. According to survey [5] when in a game some of the artificial bots were introduced, it completely changed the flow of the game. Previously people were behaving generously as the game demanded but afterwards the behavioral change happened, and people started behaving selfish. These are one of the social adversaries we might experience in social point of view. But what might be the impact when employment shifts because of the automation?

The Argument

AI always put across mixed opinions when it comes to refer job prospects. Looking at different economic and analyst projections, their findings seem to be everywhere. Some says there will be massive job losses across all the economic sectors, and some contradicts the point by saying there will be substantial employment growth due to the large increase in job productivity. But if we consider the job loss prospective again, we have multiple layers of impacts. If we look at the negative side, it will take away jobs from certain group of people. Subsequently it will affect the per capita income of population because of unemployment. But again, robotization might act as redistribution of labour. The job of workers might be robotized which will force the workers to shift to other work. Workers basically have variety of tasks. Some of them being taken by robots, workers must go through upskilling way to alleviate the gap between their skill and new task. Again, countries which are experiencing ageing process, where the operating age of population is lower, because of automation they surely can be benefited with their production needs.

It’s hard not to believe that AI will eliminate the necessity of various posts to do different jobs, as we are already experiencing the discontinuity. But there exists many commentators who are optimist about usage of AI in every economic field. As per many researchers AI will initiate the opportunity to create new job categories. Historically when ever there has been increase in automation in one sector of occupation it has increased the work pressure of non-automated jobs in conjunction with the former one. But if the work has been fully automated then we can expect a reduction in jobs.

But again, if due to AI if some sectors of work have been automated that does not necessarily alleviate the economy-wide employment. For example, as we have discussed above if in healthcare industry if AI is helping in faster diagnosis that means it will increase the patient intake number as well. If patient intake increases, there will be increase in demand of relative accessories to be used in recovery process of patients. Certainly, there must be an increase effort in work category to meet the demand. So, in other words the effect of humans replaced by the AI has been polarized in two direction. In one where it has cost some mundane, repetitive jobs and on the other hand there is transition of jobs from one area to another because of the automation in one field.

The Optimism

As cunningly mentioned by C. Pham [6] the discussion in context with automation and employment should not always address the negative prospective of the scenario that how many job cessations happened. It should embrace the various aspect of positivity like changing nature of work because of automatability. We can always create a healthy hybrid economic space where there will be cooperation and collaboration between humans and machines go hand in hand. This increased collaborative labour force can be the new big thing and has profound implications for jobs in the automated economy. This will give a new environment where people can strengthen their relationship, their skills. Workers can focus on aspects which demands creativity and social skills. But again, we must take special care that humans should not be brought under the domination of machines, otherwise it again will disturb the chemistry between the two and dismantle the ecosystem.

The Question

After all the arguments, now how to answer the same rhetoric question “will machines replace humans for many jobs?”. The answer is ambiguous. There are ample amount of comments in favor and against the perception. But I can see that the technical advances have short-term and long-term consequences. When we think about the short-term gaps, employment that we already have encountered with some economic sectors will certainly be replaced. There has been debates as well to overcome the scenarios. Education needs to be improved for the workforce so that they can take jobs required for automation, there must be robot tax system for every unemployment created by the robots, Concept of Universal Basic Income and many more. At a personal level like many researchers I think due to the injection of AI instead of human intelligence we eventually make a better and developed work environment where the whole work system will be redistributed. Human Workforce becomes smarter and interdependent. Ideally it would be wiser to be in economic space where we create a healthy and cooperative environment between machines and humans rather than subjugated to robots’ behaviors.

Conclusion

It’s hard. It’s hard to imagine what would be the equation of our job market in next say 20–30 years ahead. But our limited human minds reckon that perhaps the overall impact will only be unfavorable. But It would not be wrong to say that new categories of jobs will be created that directly contribute to AI-enabled infrastructure development. These jobs can compensate for shortfall of jobs that formerly might have happened due to automation or robotization. As cleverly stated by Kathleen Walch in his article [7] that definitely Data scientists, robotic engineers, and ML programmers will not make up for fewer truck drivers or call center workers. But the job creation will be there where we least expect it to happen. So, what will be the future employment scenario? Along with the job cessations and redistribution of work, will we encounter new dimensions and new categories of employment? We are certainly going through a revolutionary shift from developed industry to more developed automated industry. Many are referring this shift to a 4th industrial revolution. Transitions has shown us some ground level job closures with some skepticism. Along with that it has shown us the tremendous productivity benefits. So, with the new capabilities, there are questions which time must answer that which jobs will disappear, and which will show their rise.